Narrative: Facebook's Power
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Facebook Becomes Increasingly Embroiled in Political Quagmire (Sep 25, 2017)
There were at least three separate articles today highlighting the way in which Facebook is increasingly embroiled in a messy set of political stories. The Washington Post reported that President Obama was instrumental late last year in convincing CEO Mark Zuckerberg to take the social network’s role in the election more seriously, and later reported that the ads which have been in the news for the last few weeks were sophisticated attempts to sow division over issues like the Black Lives Matter movement. BuzzFeed, meanwhile, reported that Steve Bannon at one point tried to plant a mole at Facebook, in an attempt to gain insight into its hiring process. Try as it might to extricate itself from this political quagmire, it seems there is little Facebook can do at the moment to escape it, as it keeps getting sucked deeper in. Clearly no-one at Facebook was involved in the Bannon effort, but it highlights the tensions between the political faction currently running the US government and Silicon Valley, while the other stories suggest Facebook was used unwittingly as a tool by foreign operatives looking to influence the election. That could be either exonerating or damning, depending on how you look at it – on the one hand, it suggests Zuckerberg’s original blasé attitude towards political influence on Facebook was genuine, but on the other it suggests no-one at Facebook took it seriously enough while the campaign was still ongoing to discover things that have only come to light more recently. I hope that as part of the changes announced last week, Facebook is now attempting to ferret out this type of activity more methodically, but as with so many things Facebook-related, it’s impossible to know for sure because of the general opaqueness of the way Facebook operates.
via The Washington Post (2), BuzzFeed
Facebook Addresses Russian Election Ads and Broader Election-Related Changes (Sep 21, 2017)
Mark Zuckerberg’s first big action on returning from paternity leave today was to make a statement via his company’s live platform about the ongoing issue of Russian ad buying to influence last year’s US presidential election and related issues, the text of which has now been posted to Zuckerberg’s Facebook page. The key news from the statement is that Facebook will make the ads in question available to the US Congress, something that it had previously not done out of concern for violating privacy laws. But Zuckerberg also addressed the broader issue of Facebook’s use as a tool to meddle in elections. To my mind, he was refreshingly honest in conceding that Facebook was never going to be able to eliminate this behavior, and would focus instead on the more realistic goal of making it harder. He promised to continue investigating what happened during the election last year and share as much as possible about the findings. He announced a change to how political ads are displayed on Facebook, making it clear which entities are showing ads to which users at any given point in time, something it had previously resisted doing, ostensibly again out of privacy concerns.
There are several other elements to today’s statement which are worth reading in full, but the key takeaway is that Facebook is taking the issues seriously and responding to them in a variety of ways. One of the most notable lines in the statement, though, is this: “We don’t check what people say before they say it, and frankly, I don’t think our society shouldn’t want us to. Freedom means you don’t have to ask permission first, and that by default you can say what you want.” That’s always been Facebook’s default position, and I think it’s the right one – the minute it gets into policing which content is and isn’t acceptable ahead of time, it’s in an increasingly powerful and dangerous role, and it has a sometimes poor track record of making those calls. (A current example is its banning of the Rohingya insurgent group in Myanmar, which is at the very least a highly political decision in light of the ongoing actions of the Burmese government.) My feeling is that election meddling and many other issues facing Facebook – including the recent problems with ad targeting – are 99.9% problems: in other words, if Facebook can stop 99.9% (or some other very large percentage) of that activity from happening, that should be good enough, because trying to solve 100% of them is likely to involve far more work and cost both in financial and freedom of speech terms than it’s worth.
via Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
Facebook Announces Further Changes to Ad Targeting Options (Sep 20, 2017)
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg posted to the site today to address the issue of offensive terms appearing in the targeting options for would-be advertisers, a problem that emerged last week and which Facebook issued a temporary fix for later in the week. As I said in commenting on Facebook’s initial tweaks, those didn’t feel like a permanent solution and I predicted that it would slowly dial the temporary limits back as it found more long-term answers. Sandberg’s post today both serves as a mea culpa for not detecting and fixing the issues more proactively, and as a confirmation of my prediction: Facebook has begun allowing some of the most common user-specified interests back into its ad targeting tool and will continue broadening those that can be used over time with more human curation. It will also be clamping down more (though in unspecified ways) on ensuring the actual content served up through ads is appropriate. I’ve felt since this all first came to light that the response to it was overblown, and that the criticism Facebook has faced over it was far too harsh, and we discussed this in some depth on the Beyond Devices Podcast last week, in which my co-host Aaron Miller took the opposite view. A piece in Slate today is particularly hard on the company on this front, arguing that the company’s pursuit of profits has somehow blinded it to these issues. The reality here is that at Facebook’s scale almost any potential misuse of its platform will squeeze through somehow simply because Facebook can’t possibly police it thoroughly enough to eliminate it entirely without also generating lots of false positives. The scale of the problem identified last week and its likely impact were so minimal as to be almost insignificant, and in general Facebook is making good progress on this front and on others in taking more responsibility for policing its platform and minimizing its potential for harm. I’m therefore more inclined than others to cut it a break.
via Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook)
Facebook Faces Increasing Regulatory Barriers Around the World (Sep 18, 2017)
The New York Times has a long piece which dives deeply into the growing regulatory barriers facing Facebook in many of the markets where it operates, including the markets where it has the most headroom in terms of user growth. China is a particular focus, and the story there should be familiar based on earlier items I’ve linked to (see all previous posts tagged with both Facebook and China). But the piece also talks about Europe, whose strong privacy laws have already caused Facebook problems in individual countries, and the fact that Europe and not the US is often the model other countries around the world look to in regulating telecoms and technology markets. I saw this very clearly when I was a regulation analyst early in my career and the US was always the outlier, while the rest of the world tended to adopt European-style regulation in various areas a few years after Europe did so. That could put severe limits on Facebook’s normal business model of collating all the data created by users across its various apps and using it to target advertising. In other countries, it’s having to work uncomfortably closely with unpleasant regimes which would limit their citizens’ freedom of expression. Perhaps we shouldn’t wonder that Facebook seems to have pivoted from emphasizing user growth to focusing on community building – that user growth is potentially going to become considerably tougher, and the community building focus makes a great platform for arguing that Facebook is a force for good in countries where it’s allowed to operate unfettered.
Facebook Announces Ad Targeting Changes in Response to Racist Keywords (Sep 15, 2017)
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Facebook Allowed Advertisers to Target Ads to Antisemitic Users (Sep 14, 2017)
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★ Facebook Limits Monetization of Content Including Controversial News (Sep 13, 2017)
Facebook has announced that it’s making changes to the type of content that can be monetized on its site, introducing some serious limitations to which content ads will run against. On the one hand, this is clearly an echo of changes YouTube made earlier this year in response to the boycott and broader backlash against ads showing up next to undesirable content, and therefore a sop to advertisers. But on the other hand, it means content creators who may in some cases have built businesses out of creating content in some of the now unmonetizable categories will understandably be upset. Some of the bans on monetization are entirely common sense in nature, while others are likely to be more controversial, notably a ban on monetizing content about highly controversial issues, seemingly including news coverage of those issues. That’s one that Facebook is definitely going to want to clarify to avoid charges of censorship.
via TechCrunch
Facebook is Testing its Houseparty Clone Bonfire in Denmark (Sep 13, 2017)
Facebook has been reported for a while to be working on a potential clone of popular video chat app Houseparty, and it has now officially launched the app in Denmark under the previously reported Bonfire name as a limited test. The features sound similar to those in the Houseparty app, which was recently reported to be achieving some impressive user metrics (though I noted some important caveats). The key to Facebook’s success here, as I also noted in that earlier piece on Houseparty, will be disconnecting this app to some extent from the Facebook social graph and allowing users to form more intimate circles of friends as they can in Instagram. That’s been a key part of the value proposition for both Snapchat and Houseparty, and it’s something that’s never come easy to Facebook, which still often seems to misunderstand its most effective competitors for users’ time.
via The Next Web
Group Video Chat App Houseparty Claims 20m Users Spending 51 Minutes Per Day (Sep 7, 2017)
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Facebook Tries Paying Music Labels to Cover Infringing Material Ahead of ID System (Sep 5, 2017)
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